Adventures By Design

So today was the end of our first year teaching in China.  I’m exhausted after getting my kids out the door with all their stuff, and then packing up all of my stuff.  I wanted to write about the day though, to remember how it feels.

The school year is almost over here in Suzhou. (Yes, it’s July 1st and we’re still teaching; Friday is our last day)  Things are really busy with trying to get everything finished and packed up.

At school this week my grade had a poetry and coffee morning with the parents to share some work the students have been doing on our last unit, and to have a chance for the parents to come in one last time. It was a pretty relaxed occasion and went over really well.  Most of my class’ mothers came (most mothers here don’t work so they’ve got loads of time to come in for school events) and I think I took a photo which each of their kids, once one parent did it they all thought it was a fantastic idea so we had an impromptu photo shoot.

Here are the photos we took of Tokyo International School.

We’ve been pretty busy the past couple of months here in Suzhou. Time seems to move at varying speeds here; sometimes it seems as though we’ve been living in China forever. We have some great friends that we’ve connected with and it often feels as though we’ve known them for years. At other times though I still get that “whoa, I live in China” feeling and everything seems unfamiliar and strange.

School takes up the majority of our time; it’s pretty all-consuming and we’ve got a lot to figure out yet. I was thinking the other day about the next school year, and how much I’ll enjoy having some idea what to do at any given time. I think that Ric and I will both stay in our same grades next year so we’ll be familiar with the material we have to teach and hopefully we can spend a little more time on our teaching practice, rather than just struggling to keep our heads above water!

Other things we’ve been doing include hanging out with our aforementioned friends and drinking copious amounts of alcohol (Ric often combines this activity with music-making), yoga classes with our friend Maggie, and Chinese classes with Vicky, who seems to teach half the teachers at our school.

I am pretty determined to learn to speak Chinese, and the few classes we’ve had so far have gone well. I can say several things in Chinese now, and have even managed to understand the occasional utterance by a native Chinese speaker (a moment of pride was when I understood the Chinese lady in my cell phone saying ’sorry’ [duibuqi] when I ran out of money to make calls).

Unfortunately my newly-developed fluency can also get me into trouble. Today it got me in a little trouble with one of the school’s bus drivers. On Wednesday afternoons Ric and I supervise a bus to take some of the students home after clubs that we run. Usually it’s no problem and everything runs like clockwork with children arriving at their destinations with out any trouble. The driver of the bus is really nice too, and though he doesn’t speak English we manage to communicate pretty well. As I learn more phrases and words from Vicky, I try them out on him and he seems pretty impressed. Today however disaster struck when due to an error that I made (blast!) we completely missed a kid’s stop. I sorted it out as best I could with the kid and then had to tell the driver about the problem and that we’d have to go back. I apologized profusely (see above… I know how to say sorry) and then had a Chinese speaking student translate what I needed. However, once the Chinese speaking kid got off it was just Ric, me, the Korean kid who’s stop we missed and the bus driver. This is the point at which the driver got chatty and started rambling away in Chinese. I tried to follow, understand the word for “I” and missed the rest, nodded a little and hoped it wasn’t too important. Then the driver stopped the bus in front of the local Starbucks, opened the door and looked at Ric and I expectantly. Uh oh, the kid we were in charge of was still on the bus, and his stop was at least a 10 minute drive away. Obviously though the driver didn’t want to drive the kid home, turn around and drive us back to our destination, and then turn around again to take the bus back to the school.

In a very calm voice I explained to the 7 year old kid that we were leaving him alone on the bus with the nice bus driver. He seemed to take it in stride, which made me feel a little better about abandoning him. I left the driver with the kid’s mom’s phone number, and my phone number (though I’ve no idea how I would talk to the driver if he did call…) and headed off for my coffee at Starbucks. I was pretty worried about the kid, but thankfully a few minutes later his mom called me and told me he was home. She proceeded to thank me profusely for getting the little guy home… apparently she didn’t know it was my fault he missed his stop!

I think next time I’ll stick with English and make sure my mini-interpreter (my student Daniel who loves to translate for me and help out) has explained the whole situation to me before he gets off the bus.

Here’s an email that found its way into my Inbox a couple weeks ago.

Last year I made a set of Six Hats posters to use in my grade four classroom. I combined several useful Six Hats resources into one piece of paper per hat. In addition to De Bono’s book, I primarily relied on a list of questions and sentence stems related to each hat (including mention of Bloom’s taxonomy), and a Six Hats Summary (which is a great visual cue to use when brainstorming).

Anyone is welcome to download and print these posters. If you use them, I’d love to hear how. Even more importantly, if you have any suggestions, comments, or requests, please tell me; I want to make this set as useful as possible.

(downloadable here)

Thanks to David Hill, Sarah Shannon, and other teachers at Young Hoon Elementary School in Seoul, South Korea for helping me field test these posters.

Note: I am still in the process of organizing my teaching resources. For more information on Six Hats, you may also go to my wiki from last year